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Health, Beauty & Medical

Inside Pino’s Upgrade to Magento Commerce 2

Pino, the German physiotherapy supplier, needed to step up their eCommerce game. Magento gave them a lift.

4 Weeks to Launch

-50% Total Cost of Ownership

X2 Conversion Rate

The health and fitness specialist needed a more flexible solution.

Founded in Germany in 1904, PINO develops wellness and therapy products including massage oils, training tools, and therapy equipment. For generations, healthcare professionals in Europe and beyond have trusted PINO to deliver practice-proven an innovative products. Over the last century, the company has built a vast customer-base of physiotherapists and spa professionals, and expanded their product line to include customizable massage tables.

“Twenty years ago we shifted our market, and made physiotherapists our main clientele,” explained Martin Mannowetz, PINO’s eCommerce Manager. This followed a change in Germany’s healthcare system. “It’s very typical in Germany or Europe, if you’ve had surgery or you’re stressed, the doctor will prescribe you to go to rehab for six weeks.” By 2012, the company had outgrown their home-brewed German platform, and launched a store on Magento Community Edition. Then in 2015 they upgraded to Magento Commerce.

But the industry, and commerce, was changing fast. “We got more involved with Magento,” revealed Mannowetz. “The Amazon experience had changed customer expectations, and as a merchant we needed to live up to their standards.” Too many customizations over the years had made development slow and complicated. “We also wanted to change our business,” he added. “Our customers want the eCommerce experience with us. They want to know prices immediately, and if products are available. Before, customers had to register and wait for a week before they could see prices. This is not how eCommerce works! We wanted to create an exceptional customer experience.”

We use Magento because we want to have it 100% our way.

Martin Mannowetz eCommerce Manager, PINO

A 360-degree commerce experience.

Few good decisions are made in Las Vegas, but at Imagine in 2017, PINO chose to upgrade to Magento Commerce (Cloud). “We’d had a positive experience with Magento and our partner, TechDivision,” explained Mannowetz. “The partner can make or break the project. With TechDivision we learned so much more about Magento. We liked the Magento community, and its contribution is so much more obvious with Magento Commerce 2. It seems that with every new version we get so many more features...really good features.”

PINO started development on a therapy table configurator. “You can only be successful if you have a competitive edge over your rivals,” said Mannowetz. “So in our case we allowed customers to configure their therapy table. We use the Magento standard [functionality], we just changed the front end, and we offer tiered pricing. With Magento, if the feature we want is not available, we can find one on Marketplace, and tweak it a little bit. You want to have it 100 percent your way.” “Before, customers couldn’t see the price, and they would just go to someone else who would show them the price. We now sell to B2C customers, so it’s an open shop. We have one site for both B2C and B2B.”

“We are more welcoming now. By default we didn’t display prices on our Magento Commerce 1 site in Germany, unless you’re logged in. Now there’s a custom feature where users can see prices but not add items to the cart. Legal requirements mean that if we display prices, you cannot sell to end consumers,” explained Mannowetz. “We learned that when we show prices, we attract more customers.” PINO also found that products with displayed prices had a much higher conversion rate. After adding prices to their therapy tables, conversion rates doubled.

4 weeks to launch a totally new site.

Time-to-market was essential for PINO, so they decided to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). PINO launched their Magento Commerce 2 store in June of 2018, after only three months of development. However they found that launching a new individual store was as fast as four weeks. The results were interesting: “When we launched our Swiss shop, 50 percent of our customers used our guest check out,” said Mannowetz. “It proved that customers don’t want to commit. Sometimes they don’t want to sign up, they just want to buy something now.”

Thanks to Fastly, the site’s performance improved massively on the Cloud, helped by Magento Commerce 2 use of caching out-of-the-box. “The cost of running the shop is reduced by 50 percent,” said Mannowetz. “It’s more intuitive, and using the back-end is easy compared to Magento Commerce 1.” Mannowetz added that before, whenever he wanted to create a new banner, he had to call TechDivision. “Now I can do it myself. We focused our development budget on software and feature development, not on configuration. Because with Magento Commerce 2 we can do the configuration in-house. The whole management of the shop, the product, creating categories, especially adding content is easy. We can even use videos!”

For PINO, the sky’s the limit. They are now planning to launch an export store for sales beyond Europe, and work is underway to migrate their B2C shop to Magento Commerce 2. “We know our investment is secure,” Mannowetz said. “Magento Commerce has the best feature set, and it offers Cloud. Simple.”